Guns Up!

by Johnnie Clark

  Dear L/Cpl. Clark,

  I’m writing in reference to L/Cpl. Richard Chan, who is a patient of mine here at Saint Albans Naval Hospital.

  That was as far as I could read. I had to move. I had to jump. I had to run. So I ran up and down the barracks screaming and waking total strangers to tell them that Chan was alive. Then my leg reminded me that it wasn’t quite ready for the hundred-yard dash. By the time I settled down enough to read the rest of the letter I realized I had lost it somewhere. I started to panic, then someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to see one of the total strangers I had just shaken awake.

  “Is this yours, Mac?” the bleary-eyed Marine asked as he handed me my letter.

  “Yeah, it’s mine! Thanks!” I grabbed it and started reading again.

  I hope you won’t be offended, but I have taken the liberty of opening L/Cpl. Chan’s mail. He has undergone three operations up to this point in an effort to repair serious fragmentation wounds to his right arm. We believe the arm will eventually be functionable. Even more serious than his physical injuries though, is the state of psychological depression that he has fallen into. He refuses to open his mail or receive visitors, including family or clergy. If you feel that you could be of any assistance in this situation, please contact me at this address or call the number below between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

  I was stunned. He was alive! I had to call, but how? I walked back over to the bleary-eyed Marine’s bunk. He was already lying on his back with his eyes shut. “Say, do you know how I could call the States?”

  He opened one eye and didn’t look happy to see me. “Yeah. You know that little restaurant right outside the main gate?”

  “The one that says something about American food on the window?”

  “Yeah. They have a phone there. It’s kind of like a Mars station.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “They patch you through a bunch of ham radio operators all the way home.” He looked at his watch. “It’s probably about zero-eight-hundred right now back home.”

  “Great!” I ran to my bunk to grab my hat. Lying under it was my little Bible with the shrapnel hole. I stared at it for a moment, and I couldn’t help feeling that it was one of those little reminders from Jesus that most of the time I foolishly called coincidence. I picked the Bible up, shoved it in my shirt pocket, and headed for the main gate. It was only a couple of blocks away, but that gave me almost too much time to think. I wondered if Chan was crippled. If he wouldn’t see his family, would he even talk to me? What had happened to him to make him turn off like this? What could I say to help him? It had always been the other way around.

  Who cares! I thought. He’s alive! I don’t care how depressed he is! I started saying it aloud. “He’s alive! I knew it! He’s alive! That turd! Why didn’t he write me?” I kept talking to myself right through the front gate and up to the door of the restaurant.

  It was a strange little restaurant. They offered American steaks on the menu for fifteen bucks, which along with the phone made it the classiest place in Kim Village. The moment I sat down on a small wooden stool and pulled the varnished wood and glass door of the rather large phone booth shut, I was scared. Getting through took about five minutes, but finally I heard some lady answer, “Dr. Adelman’s office.”

  A few moments later Dr. Adelman had expressed his thanks and had Chan brought to the phone.

  “Hello,” Chan said. His solemn tone told me right away this wasn’t going to be easy.

  “You little turd! Why didn’t you write me? I thought you were dead! Did I wake you up?”

  “It’s good to hear you.” He spoke with no emotion, cold and detached.

  “Okay, what gives?” I said.

  The silence that came through the phone was deafening. For a moment I thought he was going to hang up. Then he finally said something that sounded like Chan. “How are you? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. I limp a little, but I’m fine. Now talk to me, Chan. What’s going on? How bad did you get hit?” There was another long pause.

  “Well,” his voice cracked. There was another pause, and I heard him clear his throat. Tears started tickling my chin as they dropped off, but I managed to swallow back any sound that would give me away. “Let’s just say I won’t be tying any surgical knots.” He forced out a weak chuckle, and I felt a burning need to hug him and pound him on the back and tell him everything was great just because he was alive, but I knew it would be of no use. He needed more than the “Cheer up, everything’s okay” routine. I pulled out my wounded Bible and asked God for help.

  “Why won’t you see your family?” I asked as I opened the Bible, praying for something to jump out at me. I wanted to kick myself for not going to the chaplain before I called.

  “I don’t want to see them. My folks got a divorce while I was gone. They didn’t tell me. I found out when I called home.”

  “What about Valerie?”

  “She came by. It’s over between us. It was just too painful for her mother. It’s better this way.”

  He sounded angry. I kept thumbing through the Bible, almost nervously. I could feel the tension, but I didn’t know how to break it. “You’ll love coming home, Johnnie,” he snapped sarcastically. “These skinny little long-haired wimps, fellow Americans, greet the wounded Marines with protest signs calling us murderers. You’ll love coming home.” I’d never heard Chan sound this bitter. He sounded like a different person. I tried to think of something positive to say.

  “You’ll still be a doctor. Get your mind on that. You have a job—”

  “Doctor,” he cut in. “I was going to be an open-heart surgeon, remember? There aren’t too many one-armed open-heart surgeons operating out there.”

  “Your doctor said you’d be able to use that arm.”

  “They don’t know yet,” he scoffed. “I’m going under the knife tomorrow. This will be the fourth time. There’s no way I can be a doctor now. I’m glad you’re okay, but I have to go now.” Chan spoke quickly, as if he were mad at me and in a rush to end the conversation.

  Suddenly it happened. Those words I needed jumped out at me. There they were, soiled with Vietnam mud but still legible in fading red ink, the words Chan had written in the front of my Bible.

  “Hold it, mister!” I barked. “I’ve been listening to you all the way from Hue to Laos! You’re going to listen to me this time!” I waited for a long moment, expecting a loud klick as he hung up. Nothing. Then a barely audible mumble told me he was still there.

  “Yeah.”

  “A buddy of mine wrote this to me once.” I pulled the phone away as a gush of emotion sealed up my throat and pushed out a couple of tears. I cleared my throat and started reading:

  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

  Just as it is written,

  “FOR THY SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG;

  WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED.”

  But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.

  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

  “Are you listening?” I asked. I heard him clear his throat, then he tried to say something but started crying.

  “There’s more,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking.

  And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God; to those who are called according to His purpose.

  We didn’t say any more for a while. I knew my voice would crack and I’d start crying like a jerk, so I didn’t say anything. I could hear him sniff every little bit, and I knew he couldn’t talk either. Finally he managed two words before he hung up.

  “Guns
up!”

  EPILOGUE TO THE 2002 EDITION

  I’m just a former lance corporal, now a writer, who had the privilege of serving with some extraordinary Marines in the Fifth Marine Regiment. We were young. We all made some mistakes, some bad decisions. We were not, and are not, perfect, but these Marines were consistently courageous and America should be proud of them. I barely touched on some of their stories. Guns Up! was written from an eighteen-year-old’s point of view.

  As a machine gunner, I was formally attached to Weapons Platoon, though I never actually served with Weapons Platoon. As a gunner, I was always with the First, Second, or Third Platoons of Alpha Company. Most of the time I was with the Second Platoon, but when another platoon needed a gunner and they pointed at me, I got shipped to the First or Third platoon. That meant a different lieutenant, different squad leaders, different corpsmen, different radioman, different Marines.

  No one had a real name in Nam. We mostly used just nicknames. Over the years, I have discovered some of their real names, and I would like to honor some of those Marines by telling you what happened to them after Nam. I say that and yet I am not sure there will ever be an after-Nam for some of us.

  It never, ever leaves you.

  Compared to heroes like Cpl. Jesus Quintana and Sgt. Vince Rios and thousands of others who gave their legs and arms and lives for our country in Vietnam, I hesitate to mumble even the slightest complaint. But for the sake of that Nam vet you may be acquainted with, a smell, a sound, a blur, a helicopter flying overhead, rain, bright sunlight, or a dark night, almost anything can turn a distant memory into a flashback as real as your next breath. It is not always a bad memory, but when one of those moments strikes, it is impossible to explain it to others.

  The story of how I hooked up with some of these remarkable Marines so many years later is another book. Like the first one, the Lord was in obvious control.

  After I left Yokosuka Naval Hospital in Japan, I spent quite a while in Okinawa. Part of my rehabilitation there was training in martial arts. By February 1969, I was healthy again. While I was in Okinawa, serving as an MP, S.Sgt. James Monroe and L/Cpl. Charlie Goodson came through on their way back to the States. I loosely based the fictional character Goody in my novel Semper Fidelis, on Goodson. He was the kind of man you wanted beside you in a firefight. Typical of all Marines, he would risk his life in some insane act of heroism and then immediately curse the Marine Corps and everyone associated with the Marine Corps. He was an absolute riot, and I loved him. Charlie Goodson had been wounded in the neck, and his tour was over. He began to fill me in on what had happened to most of the guys after I left.

  I felt ashamed sitting in Okinawa, fat and healthy, while the guys were going through hell. I tried on more than one occasion to go back to Vietnam, but they would not let me return until I spent a year stateside. At that time in my nineteen-year-old life, a year of stateside duty sounded like prison. The Corps gave me an early out. For the rest of my life I have deeply regretted not going back. I came home with a planeload of wounded guys.

  We landed in El Toro, California, and we saw our first war protesters. They mooned us and threw tomatoes and waved Baby Killer signs. After a day or so of classes telling us about the Veterans Administration and job opportunities, the Marine Corps gave those Marines that were able a three-day pass.

  It took me just two hours to get arrested for decking a disloyal American in the L.A. Greyhound bus terminal. The cops who arrested me were old Marines. They handcuffed me, drove me down the street, and told me it was against the law to deck cowards in front of cops. They tried to warn me that America was not treating returning veterans very well. It was not the way I wanted to come home.

  I continued training in martial arts, learning tae kwon do, a Korean martial art. I eventually taught martial arts at the University of South Florida. It was a good way to release some of the anger. I married a beautiful woman named Nancy. I became a mailman but got injured delivering a crate of books and was down for about a year. That’s when I started writing Guns Up! The book was born in anger; it was my way of fighting back against a steady stream of lies coming out of the media about our guys in Vietnam.

  A couple of years ago, I got a package in the mail. It was from the Cincinnati Enquirer. The editors were searching for anyone who may have served with a U.S. Marine named PFC Richard Weaver. I’d never heard of Richard Weaver. The newspapers in the package had articles about Weaver. There was a photo of a handsome young Marine in his dress blues. We never looked like that in Nam, so he didn’t look familiar. I started reading the articles. They were letters written by Weaver to a man named Hank Beucker.

  The story was fascinating. Richard had been unofficially adopted by this old Marine named Beucker. Beucker had been wounded at Guadalcanal and served with Admiral Halsey. Hank Beucker taught Richard Weaver to hunt and fish and fight while the rest of us were still watching cartoons. Richard Weaver was a big, tough redhead who had been a bouncer in the toughest bar in town when he was fifteen. As I continued to read, a lump the size of a golf ball formed in my throat. The letters home to the old Marine from the young Marine read like excerpts from Guns Up! They threw me off balance for a few days. It was like opening a grave. Suddenly I was back in the bush and feeling guilty for the times that I failed. There were more memories than I wanted to deal with, and my family knew something was wrong.

  I called the phone number with the newspapers. It belonged to another Marine, Bill James. Bill was one of the guys who organized information about the 5th Marine Regiment. Bill James had fought with A 1/5 in Hue City in 1968. He served as a radioman for Sgt. James Monroe. I wrote inaccurately about Sergeant Monroe in this book. I called him Staff Sergeant Morey. He was wounded at Thuong Duc in the last chapter. I served with some three-war Marines. I thought he was one of them. Writing the book ten years after the war led to more than one mistaken exaggeration. Sergeant Monroe was a small Marine with a big walrus mustache. He was humble, brave, and absolutely loved by his men. Another hero from the battle of Hue City, he was a father for eighteen-year-old kids like me. Sergeant Monroe went on to become a sergeant major and now lives in Japan. I told Bill James that the newspaper articles had to be by the same Marine I knew as Big Red. Bill told me that some of the guys in the platoon had already figured it had to be Red, but he wanted me to confirm it. He told me that high school buddies of Richard Weaver wanted to honor him. It seemed that about three decades later they were just discovering that Richard Weaver was a hero.

  The battle for Truoi Bridge was Richard Weaver’s story, not Johnnie Clark’s. Richard “Big Red” Weaver helped hold off an estimated four hundred NVA regulars and sappers at Truoi Bridge. He was not the only hero at Truoi Bridge. There were many. Fifteen Marines died. Later, L/Cpl. Dennis Sliby was awarded the Navy Cross for saving the lives of fellow Marines. After having part of his leg blown off, he continued to pick up enemy grenades and throw them back at the NVA. The enemy left sixty-four dead, but the number of NVA killed was far higher than that. Taking that bridge was a major objective for the communists during the Tet Offensive. A small group of Marines said no. They held out against overwhelming odds. Maybe our newspapers should have been telling those stories.

  Mr. Bill Wiederman and Mr. Lon Deckard asked me to come to Cincinnati and speak at the memorial dedication and the unveiling of a beautiful monument to honor Richard “Big Red” Weaver. Bill and Lon were high school buddies of Richard Weaver’s; Lon is also a Vietnam veteran. They went above and beyond to see that Red’s sacrifice was recognized. The monument was erected in front of Red’s old high school, Indian Hills High. That was one hard journey for me. I had no idea how many wounds it would open. They treated me like I was something special because I wrote a book. It was very humbling, especially when I looked around me. Marines with more time in the bush than I had in the Corps watched as I spoke.

  Jesus Quintana was there. I called him Sanchez or Paunchy Villa in the book. I wrote about the day he lost his leg
s. That one day could have been an entire novel. Words do not describe the awe-inspiring bravery of Marines like Cpl. Jesus Quintana, Gunnery Sergeant McDermott, and Navy corpsman Michael “Doc” Turley. Jesus Quintana was my gun team leader, a handsome, muscular Marine with more courage than most people could even bare watching. Chan and I were setting up our gun position in a break in a hedgerow when we were ordered to put our gun in another place. We picked up our gear and moved, passing Corporal Quintana on his way with his gun team to our spot between the hedges. One of the men in his gun team tripped a 155 mm booby-trapped artillery round. We found Quintana facedown on the ground. With help from the gunny, he sat up in a pile of blood and bones and looked at where his legs used to be. He did not go into shock. He looked around for his buddies, actually more concerned for them than himself. Doc Turley begged Quintana to let him help him, but he wouldn’t let anyone help until the others were saved. Doc Turley, and likely another corpsman I cannot remember, did everything humanly possible. Doc also worked on a young Marine named L/Cpl. John L. Davis until the boy miraculously regained consciousness long enough to say, “I’m going to die.” Then he died. Only after being convinced that the other four Marines were dead would Jesus Quintana allow Doc Turley and Chan to help.

  Gunny McDermott was also seriously wounded but gave no thought to his own wounds while Quintana was seemingly dying. In Gunny McDermott’s arms, Quintana pulled his little Gideon Bible out of his helmet, opened it, and read. Jesus Quintana looked up into the gunny’s face and said, “I’m going to make it.” We had to get Quintana out if there was any hope he’d survive. There were so many dead Marines on the chopper that it could not get off the ground, and there was incoming fire. Gunny McDermott refused to be medevaced. He jumped out to lighten the weight, allowing the chopper to lumber off the ground. Gunny stayed in the bush seriously wounded, but Quintana made it. Two days later, the gunny was medevaced, and I never saw him again.